Conflicting movements between vehicles at intersections cause significant problems in modern day urban driving, including accidents and traffic bottlenecks. To manage traffic at an intersection, traffic signals are commonly installed and used. While traffic signals can improve safety can capacity over static solutions such as stop signs, they suffer from significant limitations.
For example, traffic signals are purposefully designed to interrupt traffic streams, to allow competing traffic streams to traverse an intersection. This increases road congestion and fuel usage, particularly during high traffic volume parts of the day, such as rush hour.
Additionally, traffic signals can be very expensive for governments, tax payers, or stakeholders, to install and maintain.
While recently various autonomous intersection management systems (AIMS) have become available that can control connected and/or autonomous vehicles at intersections without the use of traffic signals, these AIMS have significant drawbacks that necessitate a better alternative. For example, US Pre-grant Publication 2013/0018572 (US'572) discloses an apparatus and method for controlling vehicle at autonomous intersection. The method controls traffic at an intersection without the help of traffic signals to control traffic streams. However, under US'572's method, all vehicles must be connected and automated. Additionally, the centralized controller must have full knowledge about and control of all the vehicles at intersection in order to control vehicle traffic at the intersection, which is impractical given the number of different makes and models of vehicles, the mix of autonomous, connected, and unconnected vehicles that exist on roadways.
In another example, U.S. Pat. No. 9,818,299 (US'299) discloses an autonomous intersection navigation control system that provides vehicle-to-vehicle intersection navigation control based on vehicle-to-vehicle communications. In the system, one host vehicle collects intersection arrival data of other vehicles and assigns priority to each of them, so as to assist them pass the intersection safely without the help of traffic signals. However, this system still requires all vehicles at the intersection to be connected and equipped with wireless communication devices, and all vehicles are required to exactly follow the instructions of the system, which is impractical as noted above. In addition, US'299 merely proposes the framework for autonomous intersection management with connected vehicles and does not describe how performance at intersections, such as mitigating congestion or reducing fuel usage, could be achieved.
Various other studies describe signal-free intersection control systems that purportedly optimize traffic performance at intersections with connected and autonomous vehicles using different optimization algorithms. However, like the above solutions, these studies require all involved vehicles to be connected and autonomous vehicles so that all vehicles in the vicinity of the intersection can share information with others vehicles and/or vehicle infrastructure. As such, the systems must have authorization to fully control the behaviors of all vehicles at the intersection. This requirement is too strict in a world where vehicles at an intersection have varying capacities (e.g., ranging from none to fully autonomous) for onboard self-control, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, etc.
Various other intersection management solutions using connected and autonomous vehicles require a certain percentage of connected and autonomous vehicles to exist so that the solutions can estimate traffic conditions of intersections, and search for the optimal signal phasing and timing plans to improve the performance of the intersection. However, these solutions require traffic signals to exist at the intersections, and the connected and autonomous vehicles must be able to communicate with the signalization systems that control the traffic signals, and thus are inapplicable to embodiments in which traffic signals are not used.